This $10000 3D-Printed Concrete House Took Only 24 Hours to Build

The home was unveiled in March 2018 in Austin, TX and was built using a prototype of the mobile printer ICON is creating for New Story and the developing world.

Jason Ballard, who is one of the three founders at ICON and also runs a sustainable home upgrade service called Treehouse, will use one of these homes as an office to see how well they work before the company implements them into communities. To date, the company has built more than 1,500 low-priced, high-efficiency homes in developing countries like Bolivia, Haiti, and Mexico.

In the longer term, ICON has partnered with housing nonprofit New Story to take its technology to the developing world.

ICON has introduced a new method of producing homes with a massive 3D printer. ICON displayed how it could construct a 650-square-foot house out of cement in one day at the annual film and innovation festival known as SXSW.

"(ICON) believes, as do I, that 3D printing is going to be a method for all kinds of housing", New Story co-founder Alexandria Lafci said.

Right now, about 1.2 billion people in cities around the world lack affordable and secure housing, according to a new report from the World Resources Institute Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, which equals about 330 million households. On the outside, it doesn't look like anything particularly special, although the covered patio and spacious windows are less common on tiny poured-concrete buildings.

New Story said that they'll print the first community in El Salvador, with other locations to follow after. However, by working alongside ICON, they now have access to the impressive Vulcan 3D printer. "With 3D printing, you not only have a continuous thermal envelope, high thermal mass, and near zero-waste, but you also have speed, a much broader design palette, next-level resiliency, and the possibility of a quantum leap in affordability". One of them is Apis Cor in Russian Federation. 3D printing is already revolutionizing the way products are created and will continue to do so in the future, according to experts. To battle this inadequacy, an Austin-based startup has proposed an answer of building up a house by utilizing ease 3D printing. It is hoped that in terms of housing, the cheap construction could start a trend for affordable housing.